Late Middle Ages

Education in the medieval university

Between roughly 1200 and 1500 the university — a corporation of masters and students licensed by pope, emperor, or king to teach and to grant degrees — became the dominant institution of higher learning in Latin Christendom. By 1400 there were some fifty studia generalia in Europe, with new foundations still appearing: Erfurt in 1379, Vienna in 1385, St Andrews in 1413, Leuven in 1425. Late medieval Europe took the medieval university for granted in a way that it had not a century earlier, and the article below traces what was actually taught, who paid for it, and how the institution changed under the strain of plague, war, and a slowly widening reading public. The wider context of books, schools, and leisure is in the overview of books, education, and leisure, the book trade itself in The medieval book and the late medieval scriptorium, and the knightly counterpart in Games, sports, and tournaments in the late Middle Ages.

From cathedral school to studium generale

The university did not appear from nothing. It grew out of the cathedral and monastic schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where scholars such as Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard had already begun to attract students from across Europe. Abelard’s teaching at Sainte-Geneviève and on the Île de la Cité in the 1110s and 1120s was the kind of magnetic draw that would, two generations later, look like an institution. The decisive moment came in the decades around 1200, when the masters of Paris and Bologna began to organise themselves as universitas magistrorum et scholarium — sworn bodies with their own statutes, seals, and legal personality. Pope Gregory IX confirmed the Paris masters in 1231 by the bull Parens scientiarum, and Frederick II granted similar protection to Bologna in 1232. By then the line between a great cathedral school and a university was already drawn: the university had a studium generale, the right to teach the higher faculties, and a recognised licentia docendi that travelled.

The northern and southern models diverged. Bologna organised itself as a universitas scholarium — a guild of students who hired and dismissed their masters — and it was the model for the student-run universities of Italy, southern France, and the Iberian Peninsula. Paris was a universitas magistrorum, governed by the masters through the faculties, and it shaped the northern model: Oxford, Cambridge, Toulouse, Prague, Vienna. Alan Cobban and Hastings Rashdall both built their histories around this distinction, and the geography of student migration follows the lines they drew. An Englishman in 1380 went first to Oxford, and only to Paris or Bologna for further study; a German from Cologne was far more likely to go to Paris or, after 1348, to the new university at Prague.

The arts course and the scholastic method

Most students never reached the higher faculties. They stopped, if they were lucky, at the Faculty of Arts, which is where the baccalaureate and the magisterium were given. The arts curriculum was based squarely on the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). The trivium mattered more than the quadrivium in practice; an Oxford bachelor of the 1390s spent more time on the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain than he ever did on Ptolemy. The prescribed texts were remarkably stable across Europe: Aristotle’s Organon in logic, Donatus and Priscian in grammar, Cicero’s De inventione in rhetoric, Sacrobosco’s De sphaera in astronomy. The student progressed through roughly six years of formal arts study, sitting for his determinatio (a public defence) at the end and his inception (the formal admission to the magisterium) at the end again.

What made the medieval university intellectually distinctive was the scholastic method: the systematic quaestio, in which a master raised a question, set out the objections (objectiones), stated his own position (respondeo), and replied to each objection in turn. The method is on display in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (1265–1274), where a single article — Utrum Deus sit — carries the reader from the objections of the philosophers to the angelic doctor’s reply. The same method, applied to non-theological questions, produced the works of William of Ockham, John Buridan, and Marsilius of Padua. The recent work of John Marenbon and Ruedi Imbach has done a great deal to rescue scholasticism from its reputation as arid formalism; the quaestio was, in their reading, a flexible instrument that could turn a sermon into a disputation or a textbook into a series of open problems.

The higher faculties: theology, law, medicine

The three higher faculties were, in descending order of prestige, theology, law (canon and civil), and medicine. Paris and Oxford taught theology as the queen of the sciences; the chancellor of the university was usually a doctor of theology, and the Dominicans and Franciscans fought for the chairs. Thomas Aquinas held a chair in theology at Saint-Jacques from 1256; his contemporary Bonaventure held the Franciscan chair. By the late fourteenth century the study of theology was well established, if contested, at Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Toulouse, and the new German universities. The product — Aquinas’s Summa, Peter Lombard’s Sentences with its running commentaries, the Quodlibeta of the great masters — fed the rest of the curriculum: an arts master in 1380 was expected to know his Sentences.

Law was divided into two streams. Roman (civil) law, based on Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis recovered at Bologna around 1070, was taught at Bologna, Padua, Montpellier, and Orléans; canon law, based on Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140) and the Decretals of Gregory IX (the Liber extra, 1234), was taught at Bologna, Paris, and the schools attached to the papal curia. Bologna’s distinction in law drew students from all over Europe, and a degree from there opened a career in the Church hierarchy or in the service of a king. The Bologna law school of the late Middle Ages, with its Summistae, its repetitores, and its student-run nationes, is reconstructed in detail in Hermann Kantorowicz’s classic study.

Medicine was the smallest faculty and the most practically useful. It was taught at Salerno (in decline after 1300), Montpellier, Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford, and it was based on the works of Galen and Hippocrates, transmitted through Arabic and Greek in new translations from the circle of Constantine the African and, in the late Middle Ages, through the medical humanists of Padua. Anatomy was taught from the pig, the dog, and — in a handful of cases, at Bologna and Padua in the late fourteenth century — from the human body. Mondino de’ Luzzi’s Anathomia of 1316 is the first modern treatise on dissection, and it is also, in its dry practical detail, a useful corrective to the idea that the medieval doctor knew nothing of the inside of the body.

The studentes: a transnational corporation

The students of the late medieval university were a recognisably modern social type: young, mostly male, mostly between fourteen and twenty, drawn from every part of Christendom, and concentrated in a few great centres. Rashdall estimated some 6,000 students at Paris at its late thirteenth-century peak; Cobban suggests 2,000–3,000 at Oxford in the 1380s. They were organised in nationes — at Paris, the French, Picards, Normans, and English; at Bologna, the Lombard, Tuscan, Ultramontane, and German — which negotiated with the masters and the town. They wore distinguishing dress (the cappa), paid fees that could be ruinous, and congregated in rented halls that were notorious for their fire risk, their cold, and their proximity to the taverns.

The university student in 1380 was recognisable to his contemporaries. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford — “noght o word spak he more than was neede … Ful threadbare was his overeste courtepy” — is the most famous English portrait; the French fabliau tradition, the German Schelmenroman, and the records of bishops’ visitations are full of the same figure. The English nation at Paris had a chapel and a beadle; the German nation at Bologna, a consiliarius and a treasury. The students were also a self-conscious pressure group, capable of rioting, of striking (the famous migration of students from Paris to the suburbs in 1229), and of petitioning popes and kings.

A degree was an expensive commodity. A bachelor of arts at Oxford in the 1380s paid about 8s. 4d. in tuition fees over his course, plus another 2s. 6d. or so for the determinatio, and roughly the same again for the inception to the magisterium — sums recorded in J. I. Catto’s study of late medieval Oxford. The cost of bed, board, candles, parchment, and (especially) the pecia, the rented sections of a set textbook, was again as much again. A Yorkshire clergyman’s son might scrape through; a poor boy from the artisanat almost certainly could not, and the evidence is that the medieval university was, in social terms, the preserve of the middling and the well-to-do. The presence of poor scholars in the wills and the chantries is a thin counterweight to the broad pattern, well documented in Jeremy Catto’s and Robert Swanson’s work on English universities, of recruitment from the minor gentry, the merchant class, and the better-off clergy.

Books, money, and the texture of student life

The student carried, in his wooden chest, the libri necessarii: the texts that the faculty required. At Paris the arts bachelor in the late fourteenth century needed his Aristotle — the Organon, the Physics, the De anima — plus Sacrobosco, Donatus, and the logical works of Peter of Spain; the theology student, the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Bible; the law student, the Corpus iuris civilis and the Decretum. The university booksellers, the stationarii, ran the pecia system, in which a single exemplar of a set book was broken into quires that were rented out seriatim. The stationarius of the university of Paris, the stationarii privati of the vicus stramineus (the Rue du Fouarre, around which the arts faculty clustered), and the itinerant book sellers of Oxford’s St Mary’s Entry are documented in Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse’s study of the Parisian book trade.

The 1380s were a difficult decade. The Black Death of 1347–1351 had cut the ranks of masters and students and disrupted the supply of books; the Great Schism of 1378 had produced two competing popes and two competing universities at Prague and at Kraków; the Hundred Years’ War repeatedly closed the roads from England to Paris. The late medieval university responded, in part, by a more rigorous examination system (the determinatio was tightened at Paris by the bull of Clement V in 1313 and again in the 1360s), by the introduction of printed textbooks after 1470, and by a slow northward and eastward shift of the centre of gravity. Vienna (1385), Erfurt (1379/1392), Wittenberg (1502), Frankfurt an der Oder (1506) belong to this late phase. By 1500 the medieval university was, in many respects, already the early modern university, with the same faculties, the same degrees, and much the same teaching; the Reformation, the Jesuits, and the scientific revolution would adjust it further, but the institutional core remained.

Crisis, reform, and the late medieval inheritance

The late medieval university was, in a way that the original founders could not have predicted, resilient. It weathered the loss of teaching during the plague years, the suppression of the Friars’ chairs in some places after 1340, the closing of the Paris faculty in the early 1380s during the western Schism, and the financial pressures of the late fifteenth century. It also produced the texts that defined the late medieval intellectual world: Aquinas’s Summa, Ockham’s Quodlibeta, Jean Buridan’s Summulae logicales, Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, and the printed editions of Erasmus’s Adagia (Paris, 1500) and Reuchlin’s De rudimentis Hebraicis (Pforzheim, 1506).

The historiographical debate is, in some respects, still open. Hastings Rashdall’s The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1895, revised by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, 1936) is still the great synthetic work, in spite of its age. Alan Cobban’s The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (1988) is the standard treatment of the English foundations. Rashdall’s optimism about the quality of late medieval teaching has been challenged, in particular by James A. Brundage and William J. Courthart, who have stressed the often primitive pedagogy of the late medieval lecture; Marcia Colish’s work on the intellectual culture of the schools has done the same. The result is a more chastened picture of the late medieval university, but a more accurate one: an institution that could turn out a few great minds, that could teach a useful arts degree, and that gave Europe a portable, recognised credential that lasted into the modern period.

References

  • Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1936).
  • Alan B. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (University of California Press, 1988).
  • John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (Routledge, 1987).
  • Richard and Mary Rouse, “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, c. 1250–c. 1350,” in The Book in the Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  • Jeremy I. Catto, “The Medieval University,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 1 (Clarendon Press, 1984), 91–146.